David Bowie created an expansive body of work. Spotify’s biography of him starts by noting that “[t]he cliché about David Bowie is that he was a musical chameleon […]” What patterns can we find in his many coloured oeuvre? Does clustering show the Berlin trilogy as an entity separate from the other albums? If so, can we see an influence of recording location in general? Do the albums with producer Tony Visconti form a cluster? I hope to visualise some interesting results.
The corpus consists of the studio albums. Compilations, live albums and rarities will be excluded from the selection. This is to prevent overlap and to focus the results.
The Berlin Trilogy consists of the albums Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979). Collaborator Brian Eno’s instrumental ambient influence is apparent. Let’s look at how the trilogy scores at acousticness and instrumentalness in Spotify’s analysis. The following plots show acousticness and instrumentalness of the first 17 studio albums by Bowie, from his debut David Bowie (1967) to Never Let Me Down (1987).
Where most albums score low on instrumentalness, Heroes and Low exhibit a high degree of instrumentalness. Lodger is somewhat instrumental, but not enough to identify the Berlin Trilogy by instrumentalness alone. But if we combine instrumentalness (at least one track above 0.7) with a wide spread on the acousticness scale, we have a description of what makes the trilogy stand out in this visualization.
Add a new tab with a new visualisation, ideally an interactive visualisation, incorporating Spotify’s chroma features (pitches) in some way. For example, you could try one of the following.
If your corpus includes multiple recordings of the same piece, show their alignment with the dynamic time-warping techniques from class. If there is a noticeable outlier in your corpus, show a chromagram of that piece and annotate several key moments.